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Law Firm Compensation: What Will You Pay Your Injury Lawyer...Law firm compensation is an important thing to consider when evaluating potential injury lawyers.When trying to find an injury lawyer, you should be asking certain things. You want to know their: -case experience; -views on your case; and -your potential settlement amount. You also want to know how much the lawyer's services will cost and what you're getting for your money. You'll find that most personal injury law firm compensation is the same in terms of billing and the amount they take from your settlement. How things work within each firm can be quite different though. You'll need to ask who will actually be doing the work for you case. As for finding a lawyer that's right for your case, you want to know about their experience. What's their track record? How much of their work has been in personal injury cases, and how many of those cases were similar to yours? Then you’ll want to know if they’ve had dealings with the insurance company you’re up against or the insurance claim adjuster handling your case. Just as important, you'll need to know if they generally represent plaintiffs (people like you), or defendants (insurance companies). You may want to find a lawyer who's used to working against the insurance companies. But it's not a bad thing if your lawyer has past experience working FOR the insurance companies - inside knowledge of how your opponents operate is always helpful. The tougher questions come when you find yourself talking about their law firm compensation. They should be very clear about how much you can expect to pay from your final settlement award. They will charge you a percentage of your award. This is because most of us can’t afford to pay a lawyer up front. On the same note, we can’t afford to pay the lawyer by the hour as the case moves along. Because of this, it's usually best to do what's called a contingency fee. This is where the lawyer takes a percentage of your award. The contingency fee is almost always very high, usually around 33%. Sometimes they'll ask for as much as 40% of the final award. That means if your case is ultimately awarded $10,000, your lawyer gets $4,000. While this seems like a huge amount at first, remember that the lawyer is taking a chance by representing you. If your case ends up losing, the lawyer gets nothing for their work. There's more to injury law firm compensation than just a contingency fee. There are also working costs. Typically those costs will be deducted from your settlement before the lawyer calculates their contingency fee. Looking back at that $10,000 award, if the lawyer incurred $500 in expenses and is charging a 33% contingency fee: $10,000 - $500 = $9,500 33% of $9,500 = $3,135. In this scenario you're paying out a total of $3,635. You'll want to discuss the fine print before signing anything. Situations will arise where you don’t get any personal injury compensation. Does your contract still call for the lawyer to be reimbursed for expenses? What if you're awarded less than the total expenses? If you bring this up before you find an injury lawyer, you'll be able to work out a deal. Usually you'll wind up splitting the expenses if the award ends up being that low. Now that you’ve discussed fees, you'll want to know who's doing all the work. Just because you find an experienced lawyer doesn’t mean they'll personally handle every aspect of your case. In a law firm lawyers usually share the workload. They also have paralegals who do a lot of the paperwork. This is good because if you're paying by the hour, you'll be paying less in law firm compensation if the simpler work is done by a paralegal than their high-priced boss. But you want to be sure (after going through the trouble of finding an attorney with the right experience) that they won’t be passing off the case to a less experienced colleague. A final thought on all this: there's a good chance you've already done a lot of the work on your own case. You might have collected witness statements and all the necessary medical documentation. If you're looking for an attorney to handle a case that you’ve already done a lot of work on, you should be able to negotiate a lower fee. Bring all of your work with you to show the lawyer before negotiating any payment structure. Return from Law Firm Compensation to Find Attorney Return from Law Firm Compensation to Personal Injury Settlement Guide How Much Is Your Case Worth? Find out NOW! Complete this form for a FREE case review by an experienced attorney... The accuracy of information on this site is not guaranteed. Information on this site is strictly opinion and should not be considered formal legal advice. Under no circumstances should the information on this site be used to make decisions about the proper course of a legal matter. Click below to read our full User Agreement, Disclaimer and Copyright Information.
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